Blue Chips 2

On Blue Chips, Queens rapper Action Bronson and producer Party Supplies struck a balance that was both tonally perfect and ridiculously fun. With the just-released Blue Chips 2 they don’t tinker with the formula, and the result is a sequel nearly as good as its predecessor.

Early in his career it seemed like we had Action Bronson pinned down: he was a talented writer with a vivid imagination and an unshakable food obsession who sounded a little too much like Ghostface for his own good. But he has since found his own voice, most notably on the revelatory first edition of Blue Chips. Where Ghostface was a deliriously inscrutable writer playing the role of a wily narrator unspooling street narratives, Bronson is a larger-than-life character in his own songs. He eats tacos in foreign countries and fixes college football and NBA games alike, and in unmooring himself from the grim realities that ground the classic 90s New York rap his own music sprouts from, Bronson’s art began to flourish.

But there is still a balance the Queens MC must navigate, which became obvious on June’s Saaab Stories, a seven-song collaborative EP with the producer Harry Fraud. The Bronson character revels in worldly luxury but also in the slimy underbelly of gangster fabula, one in which women are uniformly paid for their services and rendered as objects. This was driven home by the album’s bizarre cover, in which two models were posed as props in compromising positions. But the problem runs deeper: there is a distinct distastefulness to Bronson’s music, and it is accentuated nearly to the point of disgust when the production become steely and dark, as it is across most of Saaab Stories and 2012’s Rare Chandeliers, a project helmed by The Alchemist. These beats bend his stories back toward the reality of a group like Mobb Deep, a dynamic that does not cast a flattering light on the imagined vulgarities that punctuate Bronson’s writing.

The initial *Blue Chips—*with the producer Party Supplies sourcing samples from YouTube and stitching them together with the seams showing—was tonally perfect. At its best, the world Bronson creates is colorful and comical, and in Party Supplies he has found a partner eager to bring that characteristic to its literal endpoint with a crackling production aesthetic that casts the rapper as the star of a rogue Saturday morning cartoon. With the just-released Blue Chips 2 they don’t tinker with the formula, and the result is a sequel nearly as good as its predecessor.

Party Supplies’ light, humorous touch also seems to enliven Bronson’s writing, extracting out of him scenes that are as cinematic as they are ridiculous. When he raps, “Swimming trunk, 30k in arm’s reach/ I’m on the boat in the water like a swan’s feet” on “The Don’s Cheek” I can picture the ripples in the water slowly emanating. I want a line like, “Speaking Arabic in Greece/ Grown men turn the keys to cheese as I water ski Belize” extracted and fleshed out to an entire HBO series. When Bronson is peaking as he often is on Blue Chips 2 there’s stuff like this all over the place: “Play your poker on the riverboat/ Hit the ace, long rifle in my bitch’s coat/ Flip off the balcony, knife to the throat/ Ice in the Coke/ Coke on the table, wildin’ out in Roanoke.”

Where punchline rappers can falter is in prioritizing the joke instead of something larger, turning rap into a bastardized version of stand-up comedy. Bronson is not immune to this himself, but on Blue Chips 2 his one-twos (“Shoot eagles on the Jack Nicklaus course/ Porsche with the triple exhaust”) become little dioramas, and eventually over the course of an hour he constructs a mutated version of the world we recognize—this is the escapism not of Rick Ross, but of Pixar. The punchlines can stagger individually, but when the album ends it can take a minute for the mind to readjust itself to reality.

The first collaboration between Party Supplies and Action Bronson was “Contemporary Man", a four-minute one-off in which the two recreate rap’s culture of radio freestyles but with instrumentals of 80s classics like “Sussudio” and “Sledgehammer". The track is wedged into the middle of Blue Chips 2, and it comes off as the guiding spirit of a project that also features Bronson rapping over the Champs’ “Tequila” and Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason". As a jukebox cypher, “Contemporary Man” was the first hint that Bronson might be a bit more than just another witty New York rapper.

But more than anything, the song—and concurrently the album that now houses it—is just a whole lot of fun. Bronson, for whatever reason, only seems to hit this note with Party Supplies in his back pocket. But when he does, his music is not only a blast, but undeniably distinctive.